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Africa

A new NASA-led study shows human-caused climate change has made an impact on a wide range of Earth's natural systems, including permafrost thawing, plants blooming earlier across Europe, and lakes declining in productivity in Africa.

Dust aerosols can suppress rainfall by increasing the number of cloud condensation nuclei in warm clouds and affecting the surface radiation budget and boundary layer instability. The extent to which atmospheric dust may affect precipitation yields and the hydrologic cycle in semiarid regions remains poorly understood. We investigate the relationship between dust aerosols and rainfall in the West African Sahel where the dust-rainfall feedback has been speculated to contribute to sustained droughts.

Spain plans to help five poor African countries fight hunger and climate change under a 60 million euro ($90 million) scheme to help the continent whose people flood to Spain in their tens of thousands each year. Spanish First Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega announced the aid package ahead of a Spanish-African women's conference opening on Monday in Niger, one of many African nations struggling to cope with high world food prices.

THE Chichewa people in Malawi have a saying: Njala ndi chilombo. It means "Hunger is a beast". Today, the beast is rampaging around the world and particularly Africa, where shortage of food threatens to undo recent economic and political gains. Climate change is partly to blame. But there is another less well recognised cause: long-term neglect has left African agriculture in a woefully inadequate state.

On Oct 17, 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates called for complete eradication to be adopted as the new goal for the age-old fight against malaria, with the Director General of WHO, Margaret Chan, promptly echoing their conviction. Although debate over the wisdom of this target will continue, growing impatience with the low ambitions of current efforts, fuelled by reductions in morbidity and mortality in some countries and progress in the development of new drugs and the first-ever vaccine, will lead many decision makers to adopt eradication of malaria as the primary aim for their organisations.